When we talk about customer marketing, it’s often emphasized that customer marketers should focus on existing customers, converting these customers into loyal advocates. Their main responsibilities involve cross-selling and upselling existing products to customers.
But does this mean customer marketers are responsible for customer adoption or product adoption practices? To answer this question simply: Yes.
In this article, we’ll break down the relationship between customer marketing and customer adoption, and how these two concepts interact. Specifically, we’ll cover:
- Customer adoption and product adoption definition
- Difference between customer adoption and product adoption
- Stages of adoption
- Where customer marketing interacts with customer and product adoption
Let’s get going.
Customer adoption and product adoption definition
Customer adoption definition
Put simply, Customer adoption is the process by which new customers discover, consider, and purchase from your company, including how quickly these new customers adopt and purchase your products. It encompasses the journey from initial awareness and interest to consistent, proficient usage of the offering.
While product adoption and customer adoption are often used interchangeably, there is a difference between these two concepts, namely in how broad their concept is.
Product adoption definition
Product adoption is the process of launching a new product or feature, driving awareness of that feature, and integrating it into the customer’s workflow.
Like customer adoption, product adoption is also the rate at which current customers adopt or purchase new products, features, or services, and how quickly customers accept, integrate, and fully utilize a product or service within their operations or lifestyle.
Stages of adoption
As with the process of adopting new customers into your organization, the adoption of new products or features goes through the same five stages.
1) Awareness
Perhaps the simplest stage to understand, but not necessarily the simplest to execute, is awareness. If a new or existing customer is going to purchase a product or service, they first have to know it exists.
This means working on internal communication through things like personalized email campaigns, monthly newsletters, community announcements, and more.
For external communication, that'll be working on things like brand awareness and narrative design, social media campaigns, and traditional advertising.
The main priority for this stage is to clearly communicate:
- What the product does.
- The problem the product is solving.
- How the product can integrate into a customer's existing workflow.
Eve Chatfield
2) Interest
In the interest stage, now both potential and existing customers are aware of the product or feature, you’ve got to give them as much information about it as possible. It’ll be a more in-depth view of the things already communicated at the awareness stage.
Some ways to do this would be:
- Presenting a webinar demonstrating the product use.
- Offering step-by-step guides.
- Showing an in-depth customer use-case story.
Also, be sure to have easily accessible peer reviews and outreach. Make customer reviews easily accessible for potential customers to find. Perhaps introduce a new channel within your community space for existing customers to talk to each other about the product and its benefits.
3) Evaluation
This stage can blend quite a lot with the previous stage of interest, only now the customers will be interacting with these resources while seriously considering making such a purchase.
They’ll likely interact more in a webinar, asking specific concerns or questions for their unique use case. Maybe they’ll be seen more regularly on your social media, or if they’re and existing customer they might reach out to a customer marketer, customer success manager, or customer service professional for one-to-one help.
4) Trial
The trial period will be the most likely time when you’ll see potential and existing customers reach out to you directly. If you have the option of a free trial, this is when the customer will take advantage of it.
If you have a product that has a money-back guarantee, you might find customers making an initial purchase to trial it for 30 days and compare it with the other options they’re considering before truly settling on your product.
5) Adoption
The final stage is when customers make the purchase and adoption occurs. New customer adoption will also introduce new customers to the beginning of the customer journey in the form of customer adoption.
For existing customers, this’ll likely fall under cross-selling or up-selling opportunities, perhaps even moving them further into the customer journey to customer loyalty or advocacy.
Customer marketing and adoption strategies
While customer marketing is said to mainly involve working with existing customers, customer marketers do have responsibilities around customer acquisition too. Specifically, customer marketers are involved in:
- Onboarding - By creating and delivering materials to guide new customers through initial product use.
- Education - When developing ongoing learning resources like webinars, tutorials, and knowledge bases.
When dealing with existing customers and their adoption or new products or features, customer marketers are involved in:
- Engagement campaigns - When designing targeted communications during the awareness and interest stage to encourage feature adoption and product usage.
- Cross-sell and upsell - To identify opportunities along the customer journey to initiate adoption and introduce attractive products or features based on each customer’s purchase history and usage.
- Customer success stories - To help with showcasing examples of successful adoption to inspire and guide other customers. Customer marketers are usually responsible for the outreach and presentation of these stories.
- Feedback collection - Once significant adoption or a new product has occurred, gathering and analyzing customer input is vital to improve adoption processes in the future.
- Adoption tracking - For either individual customers, different customer segments, or customers in different stages of the customer journey, monitoring metrics to measure and report on adoption progress is a key responsibility to improve adoption pathways and product features in the future.
Deanna Carrillo
Best practices for handling adoption responsibilities
Existing customer or product adoption
Adoption when it comes to cross-selling and upselling to existing customers will always go down best when you personalize your approach. Whether this is on a one-to-one case, or based on customer segments, industries, or use cases, a clear awareness of your customers and their history with your company will do wonders.
The more information you have on a client, the better your argument can be for the value of this new product or feature. Make sure to take advantage of cross-functional relationships and work closely with product, sales, and customer success teams to align adoption efforts.
If a customer has been with your company for a while and is consistent in their purchasing, be it renewing a subscription or buying an add-on or completely new product, it’s worth celebrating.
Milestone celebrations where you recognize and reward customers for reaching adoption milestones go a long way to thanking your customers for their loyalty and make them more likely to want to continue purchasing your products in the future.
New customer or product adoption
Regardless of if your targeting new or existing customers, a multi-channel approach is invaluable. If you’re looking to get as many eyes on your new product, utilizing various communication channels (email, in-app messages, webinars) is a must-do.
With new customers, data is your friend. You can use everything you know about your existing customers and market research to make data-driven decisions to help inform your marketing strategy. You can also use adoption metrics and customer feedback from your existing customers to continuously refine your strategies.
To capture the interest of your target audience at the first stage of awareness, you’ve got to emphasize the benefits and ROI of adopting specific features or products. Make sure you’re using value-focused messaging to get straight to the point of why your product is worth their time.
Challenges of adoption
With all parts of the role, there also come challenges. There’s a lot of ways to go about supporting customer and product adoption, which can lead to juggling a lot of different parts, not knowing what to prioritize. But we’ve got a few solutions in mind:
Problem: Complexity management.
Balancing the need to showcase advanced features while not overwhelming new users can lead to slower adoption rates if customers feel intimidated by the product.
Potential solution: Implement a phased adoption approach, introducing features gradually as users become more proficient.
Problem: Diverse customer needs
Addressing varying adoption requirements across different customer segments or industries means that you might fall into the trap of producing generic adoption strategies fail to resonate with any specific customer groups.
Potential solution: Develop clear persona-based adoption pathways tailored to different customer types.
Problem: Measuring adoption accurately
Defining and tracking meaningful adoption metrics that truly reflect customer success can be a challenge. This can lead to difficulty in demonstrating the ROI of adoption efforts and identifying areas for improvement.
Potential solution: Collaborate with product and customer success teams to establish holistic adoption metrics that go beyond basic usage statistics.
Problem: Maintaining long-term engagement
Keeping customers engaged and advancing in their adoption journey over time, especially after initial onboarding is tricky. It’s a well know fact that getting first time buyers to purchase again is significantly less successful than catering to other types of existing customers. There’s a very easy risk of customer churn in these early days.
Potential solution: Implement an ongoing nurture program that continually provides value and encourages deeper product adoption.
So there you have it! Customer adoption, especially when it comes to new customers relies heavily on a consistent and recognizable brand narrative. Telling product stories becomes easy when you have an established narrative to build from.
If you want a true in-depth learning path to narrative design success then look no further than our very own Narrative Design: Masters.
